• The National Advocates for Pregnant Women is filing the first federal lawsuit challenging fetal endangerment laws on behalf of Alicia Beltran, a pregnant Wisconsin woman who was court-ordered into 78-day stay at a drug treatment center to protect her fetus from an addiction she had already ended. [Feministing]

This month, Bitch collaborated with women-in-literary-arts group Her Kind to ask poets thought-provoking questions about art and language. Here, poets Stalina Villarreal and Ire'ne Lara Silva talk over issues of likability, art, and how to "write from your cunt."

Welcome to the latest installment of Ms. Opinionated, in which readers have questions about the pesky day-to-day choices we all face, and I give advice about how to make ones that (hopefully) best reflect our shared commitment to feminist values—as well as advice on what to do when they don't. This week: To grad school or not to grad school, that is the question.

In 1966, when Jean Rhys was 76 years old, her novel Wide Sargasso Sea was published. The novel, a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, is told from the perspective of the Caribbean Creole "madwoman in the attic" who was Mr. Rochester's first wife. Her editor, who worked with her on Wide Sargasso Sea,highlights the difficulty of Rhys' life, saying, "It is impossible to describe briefly the burdens inflicted on her by poverty, loneliness...It remains a mystery how someone so ill-equipped for life, upon whom life had visited such tribulations, could force herself to hang on, whatever the battering she was taking, to the artists at the centre of herself."

Author and entrepreneur Doreen Bloch wrote in a Feministing guest post, "If women make up 46.8% of the workplace in America (Source: Department of Labor) and 58% of college classrooms (Source: The New York Times), where are the female voices in our business thought-leadership?"

Every now and again I'm struck immobile by the state of our nation. I had wanted to prepare an article on the risks of sex work, real versus imagined, but I'm thinking what the fuck. Why bother. This country sucks. No one's listening. I turned on the news this morning and they're rioting at Penn State over the firing of a football coach, a man who played a pivotal role in covering up the actions of a child molester. In the next segment, a Republican audience is booing Maria Bartiromo for questioning their candidate about claims of sexual harassment, two of which extend beyond allegations into the realm of fact, as those cases were settled. Whatever he says, they cheer. This is the same candidate who said that the unemployed and working poor should "blame themselves" and insinuated that a woman who is raped and gets pregnant has exercised a choice. This is the same audience who booed a gay soldier, cheered another candidate's unparalleled record of execution and supported another candidate's conclusion that an uninsured man be allowed to die. This is not my country, I sometimes think. I don't belong here.

One theme that comes up over and over again in conversations about the State of Musical Theater Today is the tragic lack of original musicals on Broadway. The way everything is an adaptation of an adaptation of an adaptation. No one's having new and creative ideas anymore!

Recently, The Guardian asked several successful fiction writers to come up with a top ten list of their personal writing dos and don'ts. Since we've all got a secret novelist lurking within us (don't pretend you haven't fantasized about going on a book tour) here are some of the more interesting tips from the likes of Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Jeanette Winterson, and more.